At the end of 2018 we were gifted a TurtleBot3 Burger by our new sponsor, Tribotix. A TurtleBot is a low cost robot that we built over a day during the holiday workshop. The TurtleBot has a Raspberry Pi 3 (Model B) and a 360° LiDAR, 3-Axis gyroscope, 3-Axis accelerometer and 3-Axis magnetometer sensors, OpenCR...Read More

Hello! I am Barney, I’ll be taking over autonomy for the next two years for S.A.R.T. This post isn’t actually about the progress of autonomy, but rather my plans for it. The main goal for the Mk 4, is to be able to follow the left wall throughout the course. Though this will be inefficient...Read More

An issue we’ve commonly faced while operating our robot is that the servos will keep spinning if the script crashes or if we exit the script via CTRL+C. I’ve always had the stop_servos.py script for this exact purpose but it has to be executed manually after exiting the main script, i.e. python3 stop_servos.py. This script...Read More

Now that we have a rather nice PID controller, it’s time to test it! Enjoy responsibly Using just a PID controller alone, we can implement rudimentary autonomy. It’s only basic, but it’s a start and it’s the first time our robot has ever completed a course unaided. Another video, showcasing it from a different angle...Read More

On our way to autonomy, one of the things we need to have is the ability for the robot to centre itself left and right in the course as it moves forward. First, I’ll explain what a PID controller is and how we will use it on our robot. PID stands for Proportional-Integral-Derivative controller. It’s...Read More

Here at S.A.R.T., we are immeasurably proud to anounce our robot is, at long last, semi-autonomous. You can watch the robot in action and in glorious 4K below:   Obviously this is extremely basic (literally all the logic in about five lines of code), but it’s the most autonomous our robot’s ever been (except the...Read More

As I talked about in a previous post, half of our servos weren’t working. Of course, I was going to try to fix them before we spend anymore money on new ones, so that’s what I did today. Some of them were broken for certain, they either didn’t show up at all when connected or...Read More

A lot of things went wrong in Canada, sure.But perhaps the worse of our issues were the servos. The other day, we were planning on running a short demo during the regional RoboCup competition. We all got to school on Saturday and began putting it back together again. However, we didn’t have four functioning Dynamixel...Read More

A mere week before our trip to Canada we had a major malfunction of our robot’s components. Our previously wired sensors had an issue where the wires connected to the contacts on the sensor would break, rendering the sensor useless or dangerous if the wires happened to touch. To overcome this problem, we decided to...Read More

It’s been a while since our last progress update, we’ve been rather busy with assessment at school. The worst of the assessment period is over now though, so we can focus on S.A.R.T! Now that our robot is almost built (more on that soon!), the team has been able to start focusing on the software...Read More